The quick hit

This remake of the horror classic about high school is banal as a screed against bullying and inept as a thriller.

Grade: C

Kimberly Peirce's remake of Brian De Palma's “Carrie” isn't a total fiasco like Gus Van Sant's remake of Alfred Hitchcock's “Psycho,” but it's equally gratuitous. It introduces several contemporary elements – smartphones, YouTube videos, a background of home schooling – and a couple of up-to-date references, to Tim Tebow and “Dancing With the Stars.” Otherwise it mixes and matches master strokes from the classic 1976 horror movie with material De Palma chose not to use from Stephen King’s 1974 book.

The result is an ordinary, exceptionally gory high-school vengeance thriller mixed with a heavy-handed message movie about the destructive effects of “in crowd” conformity and religious zealotry. This director doesn’t have a twinkle in her eye – the film has very few laughs – and her dead-on approach makes the suspense elements and the solemn themes equally bludgeoning.

How grave is this movie? It starts with the title character’s mother, Margaret White (Julianne Moore), alone in her house, hollering that she’s dying when she’s actually giving birth to her daughter. (She thought she was carrying a tumor.) King’s book discusses Carrie’s birth, but making it the movie’s prologue both gives the film an unshakable sobriety and takes the edge off Carrie’s own famous primal scene.

By the time she reaches high school, Carrie has been so cloistered by this crazed fundamentalist mom – Margaret considers all sex mortally sinful – that when she menstruates for the first time she thinks she's fatally wounded. Unfortunately, she undergoes this trauma in the shower after gym class. She screams for help from girls who can’t comprehend her panic. They make her suffer the worst taunts of her long-bullied life. In his first published novel, King creates an archetypal adolescent nightmare about the ultimate outsider and what happens when she’s pushed to fury.

King’s plot remains compelling because of its warped Cinderella twist. Sue Snell (Gabriella Wilde), a nice girl, regrets having pelted Carrie with tampons and sanitary napkins with the other girls in the shower room. She assuages her guilt by pushing her good-guy beau Tommy Ross (Ansel Elgort) to take Carrie to the prom. Chris Hargensen (Portia Doubleday), the baddest of the mean girls, plots with her numbskull tough-guy boyfriend Billy (Alex Russell) to sabotage Carrie's one special night. Sue’s good deed won't go unpunished.

De Palma stylized King’s fiction – exultantly, beautifully -- and infused it with his feeling for the giddiness of youth. De Palma staged the menstruation revelation as his opening sequence, choreographing the teenage bodies moving through the shower like a languorous comic ballet. And De Palma’s cunning editing made Carrie's first telekinetic power surge – it burst an overhead light bulb – register with a pop inside every viewer’s head.

In King’s book, after tragedy strikes, Sue Snell pleads for grownups to remember that she and her classmates were kids. De Palma never forgets. From his film’s sensual beginning to its harrowing end, its gleeful artifice keeps audiences open to unexpected humor and emotion. He’s often been seen as a cold director because he takes characters to extremes. But he’s passionately committed to moviemaking itself. His love of craft gives his films their seductive sheen and allows you to see surprising sides to their characters.

Peirce captured emotions in the raw in “Boys Don't Cry” (2000), and she wants to be a magical moviemaker, too. But she doesn’t carry the horror gene in her directorial DNA. Her terror is punishing, not thrilling, and her recreations of De Palma’s inventions fall flapjack-flat. The quiet interludes lack rhythm and texture. Telling details from the book, like Carrie’s mother listening to Tennessee Ernie Ford sing “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning,” don’t resonate in this film’s thin atmosphere.

What’s worse, the key casting is way off. Moretz may be the same age as 16-year-old Carrie, but she conveys less vulnerability, sensitivity and innocence than Sissy Spacek did at 26. She doesn’t have the changeling quality the role requires – she looks as pretty at the start as she does in her prom gown. And she suggests an innate strength that makes her seem, at the end, a self-conscious monster, not a young woman possessed. She doesn’t match up well with Moore, who plays the mother, urgently and intelligently, as a hysterical ascetic who mortifies her own flesh. (Moore was wise not to compete with Piper Laurie’s brilliant, all-stops-out portrait of the mother as a religion-ravaged sensualist.)

As the “bad” couple, Doubleday and Russell are like refugees from an awful after-school special. (Nancy Allen and John Travolta romped through these parts in the original.) Peirce fares better with her most conventional characters. As the “good” couple, Wilde expresses a touching confusion and Elgort conjures a throwback gallantry – he’s like a 1950s teen idol who can act. (Tommy is now a lacrosse star, not a baseball hero.) Judy Greer brings freshness and verve to Carrie’s sympathetic gym teacher.

Midway through, these actors help Peirce find a mildly entertaining groove. But the climactic action is a shambles, graphic without being really frightening. In the end, this “Carrie” is not-so-grand Guignol.

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